Inverters, Optimizers, Distributed PV Electronics Go Big

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

When panel level electronics arrived on the scene a few years go in the form of a dozen startups pioneering microinverters and optimizers, I reached out to a number of solar installers for their opinion of the technology.

At the time, every single major installer I spoke with declared the technology immature and unfit for the grueling rooftop environment.

Fast forward to today, and there are are least four of those startups actively installing tens of megawatts of these products. And all of those reluctant installers have become adopters of the technology.

The entry of SMA and Power-One into the distributed electronics fray would seem to validate the market and scheme.

Optimum Size and Scale for Distributed Electronics and Microinverters

EIQ Energy, with its parallel-DC approach, is working on a 1.2-megawatt installation with Granite in Coalinga, California that has been completed and is ready to go live. A spokesperson for the firm suggested it might be the largest installation using distributed power electronics.

We figured we'd check on the size of the installations being worked on by these vendors.

SolarEdge is installing a remarkable solar project at the the offices of the French conglomerate Bouygues near Paris. The 1-megawatt ground-mount pictured is the first stage of a 3-megawatt system.

Tigo's distributed MPPT solution is being deployed in a 608-kilowatt combined rooftop and parking lot job that covers 220 parking spaces at the Plantronics headquarters in Santa Cruz (see picture accompanying the article). Jeff Krisa of Tigo said that about 10 percent of their business is in deployments greater than 30 kilowatts, while they have 75 systems greater than 100 kilowatts, including a 650-kilowatt installation at the offices of Clif Bar. In Krisa's words, "Small commercial has definitely broken through." He added that Tigo has both a 1-megawatt and a 3-megawatt job in the works.

Krisa also claims that the current cost structure of microinverters "doesn't take them beyond 10 or 20 kilowatts."

Jurgen Krehnke, President and General Manager of SMA America, told Greentech Media, “The SMA microinverter can easily scale above 2 kilowatts. However, we believe microinverters are not cost-effective above this limit. Microinverters are excellent for difficult roof orientations, starter systems, and small applications, but once you get above 2 kilowatts, microinverters are not cost-competitive with leading string inverters, and the performance gains, as shown by independent testing, don’t warrant the extra expenditure required for large systems."

These warnings that microinverters cannot be of value beyond a few kilowatts would seem to fly in the face of the actual installations being done by microinverter leader Enphase.

A spokesperson for Enphase told me that the firm has a few 1+ megawatt projects in the pipeline, although the largest single-site project completed is in the 400-kilowatt range.